ClimEx Hydro-SMILE Bavaria: peak-over-threshold precipitation and corresponding flood events

Authors: Florian Willkofer, Raul R. Wood, Manuela Brunner, and Ralf Ludwig
Owners: Ralf Ludwig
Last update: 20.07.2021

This dataset provides extreme precipitation and corresponding high flow events for 78 catchments in Bavaria for the period 1961-2099. 
Hydrological simulations were obtained by driving the hydrological model WaSiM with the CRCM5-LE, a regional Single climate Model Initial-Condition Large Ensemble (SMILE). 
The underlying simulations were originally generated by Willkofer et al. 2020 as part of the ClimEx project (www.climex-project.org, Leduc et al. 2019).
Using the daily streamflow simulations from the 50 members of the hydro-SMILE, we identifed pairs of extreme precipitation (i.e. areal sum over catchment) and corresponding streamflow. 
For more details on the hydrological setup see Willkofer et al. 2020 and further information on the simulations and event identification see Brunner et al. 2021.
The hydrological simulations were funded by the Bavarian State Ministry for the Environment and Consumer Protection. Computations of the hydrological simulations 
for the ClimEx project were made on the SuperMUC supercomputer at the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

Dataset components:

(1) Shapefile of 78 catchments in hydrological Bavaria (catchment boundaries): 78_Bavarian_catchments.shp, ID: catchment ID
(2) List of ensemble member names: names_ensemble_members.txt
(3) Extracted peak-over-threshold precipitation events and corresponding flood events for each of the 78 catchments:
File name logic: sim___P_POT_events_and_Q_0.99_window_5_agg_1.txt
Content of each file: 
Date: date of extreme precipitation event (date YYYY-MM-DD); 
start: start of precipitation event (date YYYY-MM-DD); 
end: end of precipitation event (date YYYY-MM-DD);
duration: duration of precipitation event (days);
volume: volume of precipitation event (mm/event);
magnitude: peak intensity of precipitation event (mm/d);
q_sum: volume of discharge event (mm/event);
q_max: peak discharge (mm/d);
date_q_max: date of maximum discharge (date YYYY-MM-DD);
temp: temperature on the day of peak-precipitation (°C);
swe: snow-water-equivalent on the day prior to the occurrence of the precipitation extreme (mm);
sm: soil moisture anomalies on the day prior to the occurrence of the precipitation extreme (deviation from mean, percentage).

Related publications: 
Leduc, M., A. Mailhot, A. Frigon, J. L. Martel, R. Ludwig, G. B. Brietzke, M. Giguère, F. Brissette, R. Turcotte, M. Braun, and J. Scinocca (2019), The ClimEx project: A 50-member ensemble of climate change projections at 12-km resolution over Europe and northeastern North America with the Canadian Regional Climate Model (CRCM5), Journal of Applied Meteorologyand Climatology, 58(4), 663–693, doi:10.1175/JAMC-D-18-0021.1
Willkofer, F., R. R. Wood, F. V. Trentini, J. Weismüller, B. Poschlod, and R. Ludwig (2020), A holistic modelling approach for the estimation of return levels of peak flows in Bavaria, Water, 12, 2349
Brunner, M., D. L. Swain, R. R. Wood, F. Willkofer, J. M. Done, E. Gilleland, and R. Ludwig (2021), An extremeness threshold determines the regional response of floods to changes in rainfall extremes, Communications Earth and Environment